Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

The art of writing comes with its own rules that you need to know, once you begin to write a post for any webpage.

I was asked how do I develop titles for blog posts, and I thought that I might write a post on that topic, but writing for the web is different from other styles. I have been working on a couple of anchor/pillar posts, when I wrote a piece that fits into my overall scheme, and kept my blog post schedule. While writing this post, I became self conscious of the techniques involved. This feeling was enhanced when an editor worked on a post that I submitted for another site. With these thoughts in my head, I felt that a post about writing a post would be better suited here.

Where do we get ideas for our posts?

I mentioned the terms “anchor” and “pillar” posts. These are posts that drive traffic to your site. These posts require more thought and research if you wish to achieve your goal. For me, I look at my niche to see if there are areas that I need to work on to pull in traffic. I write a home inspection blog. I get good traffic for keywords that include unsafe wiring, sizing and hiding a compressor unit, flood maps, and some other phrases. Home inspections pertain to several topics in the home, and I want my site to do well in all of those fields, as well as the main keyword “home inspections”.  Writing a post with the keyword mentioned several times does not accomplish my goal, so that is where the research comes in.

    Most posts are not anchor posts, yet they should be treated with some care. My latest post was about flat roofs and the problems that they can cause in Houston’s climate. It was inspired by a home inspection, where I saw a problem on a roof of the neighboring house. I could have written: here is what I saw- here is the solution. This would have been fine for my blog, but I had an opportunity. I know that flat roofs are not meant for my climate, so I incorporated that knowledge into the post. I am also working on several green home conversion posts. I decided to tie this post into that series by going further than offering the standard solution. Furthermore, I wanted to set myself apart from others jumping on the green home bandwagon, by showing that good building practices for a climate is inherently green. Most green home experts fail to discuss this fact. They concentrate on what is accepted as green. Lastly, I wanted to demonstrate my expertise to gain confidence with my audience, since they may be my clients by introducing them to some facts/terms that they may not have known.

    Was this loading too much onto a single post? I do not think that it was. The references to the green home theme played well into my solution that went beyond the standard, which demonstrated my expertise at the same time. I am not writing a detailed study or manual; I am touching upon the topics to give my readers something to think about before proceeding.

How do you write to have the search engines see this post as a valid response to a search and to have it usable for the reader?

My degree is in English literature, and I can tell you that writing for a blog has nothing to do with the lessons learned in my writing classes. Well, that may be an exaggeration. I will not claim to be a SEO; there are far better sites to teach you that marketing technique. When writing a post, you do have to be aware of a few basics. First, you want to repeat your target keyword. In my college English classes we were taught not to repeat words too often, because you loose the reader. For a blog, you want to stuff particular words onto the page, because you want the search engine to see this word or phrase to consider your post as appropriate. Here is the catch: you have to do it in a way that seems natural to a human reader, not a search engine crawler. Look at what you are reading right now. I am using the term “post” over and over again. My inclination is to use other words, like “piece”, “article”, or “work”. I use that particular word so many times because it is part of a keyphrase that I am targeting. Next, in my post about flat roofs, I changed my technique to a convention that many web editors use: mark words in bold. When a site visitor or search engine see a term in bold, they consider it important to the post. It helps make the post appear appropriate for the search. If you look at this post, you will notice that each first sentence of a paragraph is in bold, while the color has been changed and the first character is different. Coming from my background, the first sentence is the most important in a paragraph. I try to include the keyword/phrase in those sentences, or an important idea to the post, which will become secondary keywords/phrases that I am trying to bring searchers into the site with. Having bold marked words emphasizes those terms over the content, but that is what you want.In my flat roof post. I chose to highlight questions that a visitor might ask, and parts that would provide them with the details that they want.

    Basic rules of writing still apply though. You cannot write your keyword so many times straight on a page and have your readers accept it. The writing needs to be natural. Here is where grammar and blog writing dance around each other for a bit. The sentences in this post would not pass muster in a college course. They do reflect how I and others speak. Blogs by nature are casual, so I allow my grammar to slide into what a speaker would commonly utter; however, I am trying to demonstrate that I am an expert, so I have to apply grammatical rules to reinforce that opinion.

Always make the sale if you want the post to be read.

That last line was an <h3> title tag. I decide to experiment with how to use these tags in this post. My usual form is to include this heading tag before the post proper. In the tag, I make the pitch to pique the visitors attention to cause them to determine that the post is worth reading. This task is not always easy to remember, but I have to think of this first heading tag as the sales pitch for the post. The <h3> tag is good, because the <h1> is being used for the blog title; the <h2> is being used for the post title; so the <h3> is suited for the sales pitch. Since this post is turning out to be long, I want to sell the reader on each section. By selling a post to a reader, and keeping them on your site, you may be gaining a customer.

    Since I discussed marking up a page with style elements in the section above, and marking lines with heading tags in this section, you may want to know how that is done. I use to create my content in an OpenOffice program, then I would work on HTML markup in Notepad++. I began using an app that allows me to do everything in one place, Nvu. Like OpenOffice and Notepad++, Nvu is free to download. I find that it makes markup easy for people who are not used to this task.  

What keywords were you trying to hit? Proofreading and Editing are key

I have a few ideas in mind when I begin to write, but as you produce your post, you may find that you have written something a bit different than you envisioned, or that there may be keywords that will help the post that were not intended. I may write with a basic concept in mind, but I do not pick out all of the keywords for each post in advance. I read through the article to see what would be good for the reader to identify a post. I then rewrite a few places to create a consistent page. Then I use those words and phrases in my tags and keywords for the post. In the flat roof post, I decide to emphasize some names for roof styles, because they were relevant to my goal. I did not use them over again (stuff them), but I did place them in quotation marks, bold them in the markup, and define them. This helps make them secondary terms for the search engines. When writing in a casual style, I find that I can easily ramble. (Being German-American does not help me with writing brief sentences either). I go back and edit to focus the piece.

    I now work on the title of the piece. How to write a post title goes through popular swings. Basics: 1) you want to use your main keyword; 2)the title needs to sell the post; and 3) keep it short, so the associated url will show up in the search results. Selling the post means intriguing people to read. Marketing tag lines work in this regard. Along the lines of marketing, changing up cliches or book titles create memorable tag lines. Asking a question works too. Consider your audience, and how they are finding your work. They  ask a question when they search. Answering a question fits this idea also. Maybe that is why “how to” is so frequently used in titles. 

Finally, I think about styling the post.

I love to read. I need no more than the word on the page to be happy. That really does not work all of the time on the web. That is why many blogs include a picture with each post. A good picture can draw the reader in. Remember that reading a book is tactile, so the visual aspects may not need to be too strong. On the web, visual aspects rise to importance. I go through a few steps with each post that I write on my own sites. First, I change the font to Verdana, because I feel that it is easy to read on the monitor. I change the color of the first sentence to add a visual splash. Then the first letter of each sentence in the body of the work becomes an italicized Comic Sans font letter that is slightly larger than the rest of the letters on the page. I took the idea from Medieval manuscripts, but I applied it to web suitable graphics.

   I am not big on pictures. They are important to many posts. In my flat roof post, I included a photo of the roof that inspired the original germ for the post. I did two things to the photograph. I use GIMP to scale the piece down from its original huge jpeg file. I want the page to load onto the browser quickly. Next, I give the image a name relating to the main keyword. In the description of the image, I use the keyword again. This helps with the search engines, but it also makes it easier for some users too.


What works for you? Do you have to follow this advice to produce a good post? Not to an exact match. The styling portion is up in the air. Maybe marking the words and phrases as bold would be enough for you, and not the first sentence.

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